"In the 60s, we were only just waking up to the power that we had to damage the natural world," says Jonathon Porritt, a former director of Friends of the Earth. Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace trace their origins directly to Silent Spring. It remains one of the most effective denunciations of industrial malpractice ever written and is widely credited with triggering popular ecological awareness in the US and Europe. Serialised in the New Yorker during the summer of 1962, Silent Spring was published that September. One or two authors had previously suggested modern pesticides posed dangers. "Sprays, dusts and aerosols are now applied almost universally to farms, gardens, forests and homes – non-selective chemicals that have the power to kill every insect, the 'good' and the 'bad', to still the song of the birds and the leaping of fish in the streams, to coat the leaves with a deadly film and to linger on in the soil – all this though the intended target may be only a few weeds or insects," she wrote. Powerful synthetic insecticides such as DDT were poisoning food chains, from insects upwards. It would provide an unequivocal identification of the bird killers. For most of 1961, she had locked herself in her cottage in Colesville, Maryland, to complete her book, Silent Spring. Several causes were proposed – poisons, viruses or other disease agents – but no one had a definitive answer or seemed sure of the cause – with one exception: the biologist Rachel Carson. Something was happening to the birds of the western world. Ornithologists also noted eggs were often not being laid while many that were laid did not hatch. For years, reports in the US indicated that numbers of birds, including America's national bird, the bald eagle, were dropping alarmingly.
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